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Could your housing association be doing more to tackle homelessness?
How does your organisation measure up against the Homes for Cathy commitments? David Bogle lays down a challenge for housing associations
Shelter has recently released a report highlighting that at least 320,000 people are recorded as being homeless in Great Britain.
A total of 295,000 people are in temporary accommodation, 5,000 people are rough sleeping, 15,000 people are in single homeless hostels and 5,000 people are with social services. Many practitioners believe that the rough sleeping figures (which come from the government) are an underestimate.
Housing associations play a major role in housing homeless people, supporting them to sustain their tenancies and move into training and employment.
But could they do more to reduce the numbers of people sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation in the face of this housing crisis? And isn’t this what housing associations were set up to do?
“These commitments represent a challenge to housing associations to review their practices.”
Earlier this year, the Homes for Cathy group of 73 housing associations worked with the homelessness charity Crisis to develop nine housing association commitments (see below).
These commitments represent a challenge to housing associations to review their practices both to establish whether there is more they can do to house or support homeless people, and also to consider whether they are putting barriers in the way of homeless people accessing their housing and services.
The nine Homes for Cathy commitments are a benchmark for housing associations to measure themselves against or, in other words, as a means of auditing a housing association’s social impact in this area.
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Seven months on from the launch of the commitments with Crisis’ plan to end homelessness, many Homes for Cathy members have gone some distance down the road of measuring themselves against the nine commitments.
What we have found is that housing association board members are particularly interested in the Homes for Cathy commitments. They act as the ‘trustees’ or ‘guardians’ of a housing association’s social purpose, vision and values which often endure over many years and decades.
The nine commitments are stretching and some will be, initially, aspirational for some housing associations. They may well require some reallocation of resources to achieve.
So our challenge to all housing association chief executives is to measure your organisation against the nine Homes for Cathy commitments and see how you shape up. See the exercise as a dry run for a kind of social impact credit rating. There is no need to publish the results.
But it might reveal that your housing association could be doing more to end this crisis – and we owe it to the 320,000 homeless people to do everything we can!
David Bogle, chief executive, Hightown Housing Association
The nine Homes for Cathy commitments
The Homes for Cathy group of housing associations, working with housing charity Crisis, is asking its members to sign up to nine commitments to tackle homelessness:
They are:
- To contribute to the development and execution of local authority homelessness strategies
- To operate flexible allocations and eligibility polices which allow individual applicants’ unique sets of circumstances and housing histories to be considered
- To offer constructive solutions to applicants who aren’t deemed eligible for an offer of a home
- To not make homeless any tenant seeking to prevent their homelessness (as defined in the Crisis plan)
- To commit to meeting the needs of vulnerable tenant groups
- To work in partnership to provide a range of affordable housing options which meet the needs of all homeless people in their local communities
- To ensure that properties offered to homeless people are ready to move into
- To contribute to ending migrant homelessness in the areas housing associations operate
- To lobby, challenge and inspire others to support ending homelessness
Cathy at 50 campaign
Our Cathy at 50 campaign calls on councils to explore Housing First as a default option for long-term rough sleepers and commission Housing First schemes, housing associations to identify additional stock for Housing First schemes and government to support five Housing First projects, collect evidence and distribute best practice.
